Gadgetory

hey I'm seen that's right Chris here the first look at the Cree connected LED now this is the debut smart bulb from Korea the first connected light that they've done and I think it does very well we've tested it out and been very impressed with it now turning the light on we can see that we get a nice yellowy golden color temperature right around 2700 K we measured that at 26 96 so very very close to the state at 2700 K it's also a very nice brightness level you get about 870 lumens according to our spectrometer and that's very well above the 815 that standard on the box so they're pretty generous in that front now Crees for flow led that this bulb is modeled after is an 11 watt bulb the new connected LED is 11 and a half watts that extra half watt is for the ZigBee radio packed inside we measured it on our machinery and found that it was really more like 11.1 watts very very small increase in wattage for that ZigBee radio so again Cree's being pretty generous in their stats there now long-term cree plans to keep this bulb pretty open and to work with any hub that has ZigBee built in that should bring smart things into play and maybe staples connect but at launch it's only going to work with the wink hub which is a smart home platform that you can find just a few shelves down at home depot so that makes sense as a pseudo partnership at launch the actual controls that we're talking about are the basic gamut of smart features you can turn it on and off remotely you can schedule it to come on automatically or you can use what wink calls robots to automate how the bulb operates so if you want the cree bulb to turn off automatically when you leave home or turn on automatically when a motion detector catches you entering a room you can set that up on the wing cap that said I think those smarts are pretty good pairing the bulb but the wink hub was really easy and I was happy to see that because that was a big drawback of the GE link LED the other big notable smart ball but you can use on that platform but the GU link led it took me several tries to get the bulb pair it up it was kind of finicky with the Cree bulbs each bulb paired on the first try took less than a minute so I'm very happy with that that's a great result all in all at $15 per bulb I think this is going to be a pretty exceptional value in the smart home category it's cheap as a smart light as we've seen tying the GE iled of 15 bucks and I think that I like this bolt better just for the fact that it pairs so much easier with the wink platform thanks for watching be sure to check out my full review of this bulb along with the rest of my smart home and light bulb reviews at cnet.com for seen at appliances I'm Rui Crist